Nickel Mining
BGM Europe Ltd. shall open an underground nickel mine in Albania, for the production of Class 1 nickel for the battery industry of Europe. The ore will be treated and processed at the mine site to an intermediate material called “MHP”. MHP will be processed to Nickel Sulfate (for the Lithium battery industry) or nickel hydroxide (for Nickel Zinc batteries). The Company will establish in the second phase of development a nickel hydroxide company in Finland for the processing of MHP to the cathode precursor of nickel hydroxide and thus manage the entire Class 1 nickel value chain in Europe.
TThe 2010 Albania Mining Master Plan reveals that Albanian deposits total about 311,000,000 tons of ore, containing nickel at an average grade of 1.01% Ni. Albania therefore contains about 3,140,000 tons of nickel in the ground. If this was all produced as LME #1 nickel it would be valued at US$20,900/ton today, so the total metal value would be US$65.5 billion (€68.7 billion). The same nickel made into nickel sulfate (22% nickel content) would amount to about 14,070,000 tons, and at today's SMM price of US$4312/t would be worth some US$60.7 billion. If made into MHP (37% nickel content) it would be 8,480,000 tons. Accounting for the higher nickel content/ton (37/22 , or 1.68) and applying the current 82.5% discount to SMM Ni sulfate, the price is $5983/t, and the total value as MHP is US$50.3 billion.
Nickel as Ni sulfate trades at a modest 8% discount to class 1 metal, and MHP at a further 17.5% discount to Ni sulfate. Converted to Ni hydroxide the same nickel would produce 4,960,000 tons, which at $18,000/ton would be worth US$89.3 billion, a 36% premium over class 1 metal and a 76% premium over MHP. ​The total resource of the target deposit under the current mining license is ~110 million tons of ore (including C2 grade resources), grading ~1% Ni. Of this, a 60MT resource at 0.8% cut-off lies within BGMs mining permit, containing $11.2 Billion in nickel value @ $16K/ton. The Cobalt grade is about 0.04%. The license area is approximately 77km2 and the elevation of the area ranges from 476m to 932m above sea level.